B01COH9GCO Brand New; satisfaction guaranteed. Trade paperback binding. Support Last Word Books & Press and independent booksellers. Straight Jacket Elegies evinces all of life's beautiful, sordid banality in Kaufman's blunt spoken word style. Influenced by Whitman and the Beats, New York's slam poetry movement and the infamous, confrontational readings of Cafe Babar, Kaufman takes us on a trip through the dark, underbelly of modern America. Both an homage to David Lerner, and a testament of survival, Straight Jacket Elegies is a time capsule into the hopelessness of the Reagan era, when epidemics stood on every street corner declaiming the falsehoods of a shining city on the hill and the decaying of the American Dream. But it is also a call to arms for all the poets and lunatics and lovers in the world to speak up, to shout to the heavens, to survive by any means necessary.